The DSM diagnostic criteria for transvestic fetishism

This paper contains the author's report on transvestism, submitted on July 31, 2008, to the work group charged with revising the diagnoses concerning sexual and gender identity disorders for the fifth edition of the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). In the first part of this report, the author reviews differences among previous editions of the DSM as a convenient way to illustrate problems with the nomenclature and uncertainties in the descriptive pathology of transvestism. He concludes this part by proposing a revised set of diagnostic criteria, including a new set of specifiers. In the second part, he presents a secondary analysis of a pre-existing dataset in order to investigate the utility of the proposed specifiers.